Launched: Best Attendance Onstage

Community theater is one area for which I originally envisioned Best Attendance to be useful. Stage managers typically carry around bundles of binders and paperwork, including constantly changing schedules and event calendars, and have for a long time been demanding a software solution.

Some stage managers are using Google Calendar and some are using Microsoft Office, but these general purpose applications leave a lot to be desired when it comes to the specific job of stage management.

There is one prominent player in the stage management software industry now, Virtual Callboard. They launched about four years ago and have been slowly gaining a real foothold among community theaters.

I think that my solution for stage management software does an even better job. Where it really shines above Virtual Callboard is in how clean and easy to use it is. Its attendance tracking and reporting capabilities are much more powerful, and it leaves out lesser used features.

For example, Virtual Callboard allows actors to enter their availability into the system, and it takes this into account when scheduling rehearsals. The problem is that in the real world, actors often forget to do this. The result is that many of those advanced features don't work the way they were intended to.

My focus is simplicity. Best Attendance is ridiculously easy to use, and I'm sure stage managers will love it.

Three Years, Three Products

I’ll be launching my second product in as many years this January. I already have a minimum viable product built and plan on getting it market ready within a few months. Baring a nuclear disaster, I have some part time teaching jobs and personals savings to get me through at least that long. It’s in ultra stealth mode at the moment, but it will be bigger than the Segway, which, as you know, was bigger than the Internet.

I’ve had another idea in the back of my head for about four years and am stealthily conducting some market research for it. I’ll be launching that one the following January. The market for this product is huge. Also in stealth mode.

The only hints I can give is that all three products (my attendance application included) serve the purpose of building strong local communities.

Best Attendance: First Five Months

The web version of Best Attendance launched in January. This is a recap of some of the things I’ve tried during the past five months, what results I’ve gotten, and things I’ve learned.

I did manage to get a press release published on a popular website after buying a banner ad from them. Other than that, I received a small writeup on one person’s blog after sending over two hundred solicitation emails. Either I’m doing something drastically wrong, or there’s some inherent force against product reviews in the youth ministry blogosphere.

Since this is such a large market, and my app has the potential to become well-positioned in it, I’m not going to abandon it completely, but I think a strategy other than emailing random bloggers is called for. I’ve also done some commenting on other people’s blogs and forums, which has produced a small amount of traffic, but as Patrick McKenzie has also discovered, that strategy simply does not scale as a long term solution.

I mentioned purchasing a banner ad. It sent some traffic my way for the first week, but the other three weeks that I paid for were completely worthless. I ultimately got no sales from the ad. Advertising does have a purpose other than direct sales conversion, and perhaps it did slightly increase brand awareness for my software.

I looked into sponsoring conferences, but this proved prohibitively expensive. I do eventually want to secure some speaking slots at smaller conferences.

Lessons:
Soliciting links from bloggers is a slow and frustrating process, and so far has not been worth my time.

Banner ads did not pay for themselves, but did allow me to get a press release published and possibly improved brand awareness for my software.

Facebook ads are a great way to get a big shot of traffic to your site quickly. The conversion rates are tiny, but because the sheer numbers are so large, I did get some conversions to trial and sales from this advertising channel. It’s also a great way to test your software against a specific market. My conversion rates were acceptable while running the youth ministry ads, for example, but near zero when running the boy scout market ads. For getting a quick shot of traffic, testing, and getting a few initial signups, Facebook ads are good, but they are not a long term strategy.

There are pronounced diminishing returns with Facebook. After a week or two, people get sick of seeing your ad, while your competitors start bidding up the ad prices. Even after a two month pause, the ads did not return to their initial level of effectiveness.

I have been consistently running pay per click ads on Google, Bing, and Yahoo for the youth ministry and boy scout markets. Here too, there have been no signups from the boy scout side, but there has been a slow but steady trickle of trial signups from the youth ministry side. I’m staying the course with both of these ads, the goal being not only to directly convert on sales, but also having people start to recognize my name.

Lessons:
Facebook ads are great for a short initial shot of traffic but have quickly diminishing returns.
I’m going with my gut that text ads on Google and Bing are a good long term investment.

There are other sources of free traffic that I could be getting, such as from Squidoo, eHow, Twitter, stumbleupon, and other sites. I haven’t had the time to do much with these. I don’t believe that they’re as high a priority as the other marketing work I could be doing instead.

One of my priorities will be to add content to my blog. I’ve been surprised at how much traffic I’ve received by people stumbling upon my blog posts from Google searches. I have several plans on how I can dramatically increase the volume of content on my site, bringing in more and more hits. Patrick McKenzie has had great success with this approach and it’s definitely on my list.

Lessons:
Having a lot of specialized content on your site or blog can bring in qualified traffic.

What about the software itself? I’m happy to say that it has stood up very well to public use. I had a wave of hackers trying to do all kinds of nasty things to my server the first week I went live, and I’m happy to say that the software successfully defended itself against all attacks. I’ve blocked the offending IPs and there has been no trouble since.

There was a rather nasty bug which affected the email system which a user discovered. It was fixed within two days.

Other than that, the software has remained very stable. My design skills leave much to be desired. Based off of my experience with the desktop application and the experience of this guy: http://tbbuck.com/, I know that improving the look and feel of the application could double (or more) conversion rates. I’m currently in the middle of converting the site to use a professionally designed theme. Hopefully that will be completed this week. I have three other goals for the application this summer, which I described in the last post.

Lessons:
No one likes ugly websites.

What’s the bottom line?

Since January, I’ve made $3,048 of income NOT from a job. Most of that was income from a previous website, and then revenue from selling that website. I sold the old website to finance the startup costs of Best Attendance, which I think has a rosier long term outlook than the other site did. About $600 was from my attendance software. It’s pretty cool when people pay you for their stuff; they’re saying to you that they value what you have to offer. It’s a feeling that, unfortunately, most people never know.

This was on expenses of $2,130. The advertising portion was $1,543. Most of the other expenses were for supplies, payment processing, web services, and hosting. My current cash flow rate is about -$100 per month, and I’ll have no problem staying solvent for at least the next year. I have fewer than ten paying customers and don’t get much traffic, on the order of 20 or so visits per day.

So, here’s the summary:
• I’m spending more that I’m earning.
• No one knows about the software.
• I’m not getting any traffic.

Pretty distressing at first glance. But consider cases like these:

Case 1
One of my original ideas back in 2006 was to develop stage management software. After researching the market and seeing that there were a few competitors, none of whom were making any money, I decided not to pursue it. Well, that’s one reason. Another reason is that at the same time I was doing this, a brand new business entered the scene and released a product that was pretty much exactly the same one that I had in mind.

I thought he wouldn’t go anywhere, and for a long time, he didn’t. His Facebook page looked depressingly lonely, and his testimonial list was tiny. It stayed this way for about three years. However, slowly but surely, he was getting customers, and he’s at the point now, five years later, where he has a very viable business. He was exactly where I am now. Success did not come overnight, but gradually.

Case 2
I’m reading Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope, and his political career started the same way. During his first campaign, he spent an entire year giving speeches to rooms of three or four people at a time. He cold called asking for donations to his campaign, and everyone said no. He was only able to raise about a tenth of the money that he would eventually need.

Case 3
Tim Pawlenty announced his candidacy for president to an indifferent crowd of a couple hundred people. It remains to be seen where his campaign will go.

Case 4

LinkedIn started about the same way, floundered for a number of years, and just issued a fat IPO.

The point is everyone needs to start somewhere and success does not come overnight. Five years from now, I can either have an online business or not. Since five years is going to pass regardless, the prudent strategy is to stay the course. The business is for the long term, not to get rich quick.

One thing that’s been a struggle is that there are so many things that I know I should be doing, but simply don’t have time to. Here, too, a long term strategy helps. You can only do what you can, when you can. I believe that success comes a little bit at a time. Not by being great, but by being consistent.